‘More than one way to skin a cat’

To achieve its budget the Department for Transport has two tools - cutting costs and increasing revenue. Almost all the attention so far has been on cuts, but there are many opportunities available to increase revenue.

With automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) based enforcement the rate of road tax evasion amongst the 22 million motors on British roads has dropped from circa 7% to 2%. Centralised databases of motors with valid insurance and current MOTs already exist, so with the number of...